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What? Think like Critchley by exploring one of the topics he discusses in On Humour and writing a 3-4 page essay that emulates the major stylistic tendencies of philosophical writing.

When? Please email a first draft of your essay to me by Sunday, April 13 at 9:00 p.m. We will spend the following two class sessions (Monday, April 14 and Wednesday, April 16) doing writing workshop activities and continuing our discussion of the ideas in Critchley’s book. We will also meet for 10-15 minute individual conferences, wherein I will give you suggestions for revising your paper (signup for conference times will happen in our next class on Wednesday, April 9). Your final draft should be posted to turnitin.com by Sunday, April 20 at 9:00 p.m. (see the back page of this page for more details).

Why? Despite its annoying aspects, Critchley’s book is the best introduction to the analytical study of humor. Because of its “Thinking in Action” format, it touches on a host of topics and approaches, but doesn’t go into most of them in much depth. This paper gives you an opportunity to narrow your focus to one approach or topic and think about it like a phenomenologist would. This activity is valuable in itself, but it will also set you up nicely for the remaining papers, which will more likely use philosophical references and/or phenomenological writing as an introductory device before they get on to the “real” method which they consider more useful. Looking even further into the future, it’s likely that you won’t grow up to be a philosopher, but whatever field of study or employment you enter, the kind of abstract thinking you use in this paper will help you frame or set up problems you will solve in non-philosophical ways and help you dissolve away the layers of bullshit that can get built up in the gradual distortion of common sense.

How? The first thing you need to do is select a topic from Critchley. Here are the ones I found, but if you think of another good one please point it out to me. First, the three traditional philosophical theories of humor would all be good approaches to either support, disagree with, or modify: superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity theory. I might give you a page or two from one of the relevant philosophers if you choose those, because Critchley doesn’t say much about them. Then, Critchley’s own theory of the ‘pure laugh’ in chapter 7 would be a good approach to either support, disagree with, or modify. The other topics would be the areas of inquiry that Critchley touches on but does not resolve, including humor & humanity (chapter 2), humor & the body (chapter 3), and humor & social/linguistic/ethnic common sense (ch. 5-6). If you glanced at the unassigned chapter 4 and found it interesting, I’ll give you an excerpt from Bergson and you can study humor & the machine. I left it out to make the book shorter and because I already taught it in another class. For those kind of topics, you could explore the topic in greater depth, provide better examples than Critchley does, and/or propose a general theory to explain the topic.

Um, so what’s the second thing I have to do? To recap, philosophical writing tends to be negative, first person, and generalizing. It also tends to use writing as a process of thought rather than a report or summary of fact, and use reference to important prior works on its topic as an introductory device.

And then? Well look, I’m not going to write your paper for you, and you should also try not to freak out too much at this point. In my class, first drafts are for getting ideas onto paper. You’re supposed to be a bit confused, and then we have a conference and more class activities and things generally sort themselves out. That said, it would probably make good sense to write an introduction that sets up the theory or topic and establishes what the ‘common sense’ distortions of this topic are. (If you intend to pick a disagreement with Critchley or another philosopher, you could say what their distortions are.) Your thesis will be that you intend to reinterpret the topic in a different way, whatever that is. Body paragraphs could be structured by sub-aspects of the topic that you have set up or perhaps by strong examples that would elucidate it. The conclusion will restate your thesis and how it corrects the common sense perspective, and maybe give some additional applications for your thesis or some additional unsolved questions that your (short) paper wasn’t able to cover.

How will this paper be graded? A “B” range paper will comment substantively on a philosophical issue related to humor and convey a reasonable approximation of the stylistic traits of philosophical writing. A “C” range paper will contain moments of good philosophical thought and moments that approximate its stylistic traits, but lack consistency and/or overall unity. An “A” range paper will, despite its short length, be a novel contribution to philosophical thinking on the topic of humor. In other words, it will give me something new to think about and I will want to incorporate its ideas in future courses on this topic. A “D” or “F” range paper will fail to complete the assignment by turning in work that’s only halfway done or severely off-topic, or by not turning anything in at all.

Any nitpicky formatting stuff? Yes, of course. Although it will be submitted electronically, your drafts should be on white background in black type. Use 12-point Times New Roman or Helvetica font and 1-inch margins. (The default on MS Word is 1.25 inches, so be sure to change it.) Save the file in .doc, .rtf, or .pdf format. Your first draft should have all pertinent study questions pasted to the end of it. Your final draft should have a writer’s memo and an acknowledgements paragraph pasted to the end of it. (I’ll tell you what those are next week.) If you handwrote your study questions, I guess you can turn them in to me in class on Monday, April 14, but don’t expect me to remind you… I probably won’t remember!

Can you give us the turnitin.com login codes? Not here. See the prompt handout or email me.

I’m confused about the 10% of my grade for the quarter that comes from the discussion questions. If you turn them in with the first draft of each paper and give them a reasonable effort, you will more or less get an “A” for this component of the course, just as you will more or less get an “A” if you attend 19 of 20 class sessions and participate heartily in our discussions and group activities. A reasonable effort means you thought about them and answered them in full… my questions tend to have multiple sub-questions as you’ve noticed. They won’t be graded for grammatical clarity or for the penetration of the thoughts therein. I should add that the same goes for your paper drafts, and I will also include them in this grade.

Nope, sorry. I’m still freaking out. This should put your mind at ease.

that

Stopover

Phenomenological Analysis of Humor
(15% -> 3-4 pages)